In Chicago's Block Clubs, Amanda Seligman builds on her previous book, Block by Block: Neighborhoods and Public Policy on Chicago's West Side, to make a citywide investigation of the formation, purposes and impact of the post-World War II block club movement in this city. Seligman argues that by examining these organizations we can understand two facets of modern urban life in the USA: how urban residents related to their city government and how they negotiated their immediate surroundings, including managing each other's public space (p. 15).
Chicago's grid system formed rectangular blocks that were often one eighth of a mile in length and about half that in width. This layout facilitated organizing on a small geographic scale that could function through the voluntary organization, membership, commitment and leadership of a small number of residents. Block clubs could be as small and independent as one formed by residents on just one side of a block, the so-called ‘block strip’. They could extend more broadly around the block. They could, and did, become part of a larger network of block clubs.
Rather, than attempt to make public policy or influence local elections, block clubs generally pursued a pragmatic agenda to secure public services from government that would directly benefit the block. Individual clubs might lobby the city to tear down abandoned buildings on their block, to install a stop sign at a busy street intersection or to furnish new streetlights. The African American Chicago Urban League worked to organize a network of block clubs to undertake physical improvement in black neighbourhoods. The Urban League hoped that improving physical space would instill neighbourhood pride and self-respect and simultaneously demonstrate to white Chicagoans that black Chicagoans were respectable and responsible urban neighbours.
Some block clubs were short-lived, disbanding after achieving certain ends; others endured for years. Beyond securing services, block clubs sought to clean and beautify the neighbourhood's physical landscape and to regulate behaviour in the neighbourhood's spaces. They planted flowers, cleared vacant lots, began community gardens and organized clean-up campaigns to remove trash from streets and alleys. The Urban League sponsored ‘Block Beautiful’ and ‘Mrs. Block Beautiful’ contests. Block clubs adopted regulations forbidding washing cars on the street or playing loud music. They sought to foster personal safety and thwart criminal activities by forbidding loitering, gambling and soliciting on the block. After the Chicago Police Department organized its Community Alternative Policing Strategy (CAPS) in the 1990s, block clubs liaised directly with the department to report concerns about crime.
The internal focus of block clubs could work to exclude outsiders. Block clubs in white neighbourhoods attempted to prevent African Americans from buying property in the neighbourhood. They undertook informational campaigns to persuade homeowners not to sell their property. Some block clubs combined into larger associations, such as the Southwest Association of Block Clubs (SWABC), to ‘hold the line’ against black Chicagoans moving into white neighbourhoods. The Hyde Park–Kenwood Community Conference (HPKCC) of block clubs in the University of Chicago neighbourhood worked to destroy deteriorating buildings in order to forestall creeping ‘blight’ and maintain the neighbourhoods as middle class while allowing integration of a black middle class. Such properties generally housed poor African Americans and other migrants, these people lost their neighbourhoods.
Seligman organizes the book in a somewhat idiosyncratic manner. Rather than follow a chronology, the book contains six thematic chapters: Protect, Organize, Connect, Beautify, Cleanse, Regulate. On the one hand, this organization undoubtedly stems from the fact that the material does not easily fit a straight chronological development and it allows Seligman to demonstrate commonalities among the clubs. But, by chapter 4 (Beautify), the focus on themes hinders the reader's potential to grasp a historical progression in the movement in favour of seeing lateral developments. For example, the HPKCC appears in each chapter. Yet, placing the organization within the separate themes obscures any analysis of a group that appears to have exercised particular influence on the neighbourhood level. The reader must go back into previous chapters to see how the HPKCC responded over time to changing circumstances.
The book could use some consideration of whether such block clubs are a peculiar US urban phenomena and why that might be the case. Such a discussion would give international readers a firmer grasp of what these clubs might tell us about a broader urban experience and provide some comparative context for examining the relationships that urban residents develop to their local governments and their neighbours across different countries. Such comparison would bolster Seligman's conclusion that in looking at cities, we should be less concerned to define what constitutes community and focus on ‘neighboring’, ‘a distinctive human element’ that is ‘grounded in space’ (pp. 207–8). Examining block clubs and neighbouring, she concludes, would allow us ‘to ask new questions about the shape of cities’ (p. 211).
